Private branch exchange (PBX) telecommunication systems can enable corporate employees within an organization to place calls to each other without going through a public telephone network. Traditional systems can incorporate a switchboard and associated equipment, usually located on the customer's premises. The PBX equipment can provide for switching calls between any two extensions served by the exchange or between any extension and the national telephone system. PBX equipment is well known in the art, as numerous manufacturers have provided many types of PBX systems for virtually every type of business environment.
As mobile devices have proliferated, and cell phones have become relatively mainstream, corporate employees often will simultaneously be associated with multiple communication devices. “Call-forwarding” features provided by most PBX manufacturers can be used to route calls from desktop devices to cell phones. When away from the office, the employee can program the PBX to forward all incoming calls to their cell phone. This approach allows for incoming calls to get re-routed to their cell phones, and in some applications when the worker answers the cell phone, the call can be completed.
Nonetheless, this approach wholly neglects events driven or originated by the mobile device. Typical PBX applications do not recognize such mobile events. Situations where employees leave or forget their mobile phones are not accounted for. In addition thereto, several conditions can arise whereby it is neither convenient nor practical for a user to reach their mobile device. Simply put, what is lacking in the previous approaches is the functionality of viewing a user's mobile alerts, messages, indications, etc. on a PBX endpoint. Typically, employees within an office environment need the ability to see information arriving on their mobile device as well as their endpoint device.
Previously, the employees would have to make sure that they had their mobile device in a location viewable while working at their desk. Any messages or alerts targeted at the mobile device would have to be viewed and responded to using the mobile device. Those implementations focused on pushing information from the desktop or PBX system down to the mobile device. The focus was not on creating a unified view to the user's PBX provisioned endpoints. A need therefore exists to provide a desktop mobile information provider that provides a unified system and method in addition to overcoming the above-described limitations.